The Girl Child Education and The Visible Women Role Models Of Society

Do you have a daughter? Has the Ghanaian society offered her enough visible role models from which she could select? Do you not think the society is systematically telling her all roads lead to the paparazzi world entertainment and politics? That it is like being on an island coming from the cold: the sciences, engineering, mathematics and technological innovations.

Imagine your daughter and her mates listening to the first Ghanaian female Afronault (An African astronault) recounting firsthand experience of visiting space. As other group of women, taking their stand one after another telling them what it takes to launch space shuttle successfully from the ground and monitor it to its destination.

How the Ghana Observatory Complex located in the plains of Akosombo near Volta Region is full of female scientists, engineers and mathematicians engaged in not just studying the heavens but also developing technologies that are equally of use here in Ghana and the world at large. Surely, many shall be inspired to follow their steps and even dream of doing better than them in areas where society insisted is difficult for women.

Nations have liberated their women, and successfully created the necessary environment for them to express their inherent intellectual and emotional capability in politics, philosophy, economics, mathematics, engineering, arts and sciences. The result is the impressive development for their nations. Ghana is certainly on course, doing that across the spectrum of human endeavor. However, it seems the entire emancipatory machinery towards women is almost all about leading them into politics and entertainment. As if no option practically lies beyond these two for the freed and determined woman.

In Ghana, we have fossilized the impression that only those in the paparazzi world of politics and entertainment industries influence society. Intransigently woven into our societal consciousness are conversations that bother on personalities (not even ideas) in religion, politics as well as entertainment industries than the mathematics, sciences and engineering. That means our growing daughters have only women in these avenues to look up to as role models. The obscuration of the available few in the sciences, engineering, technological innovations by their counterparts from the paparazzi landscape dovetailed into the perception.

The result is there are few women to serve as role models in the sciences and co for our daughters. We all know where to find the teeming majority of the women. The increasingly disabling environment of Ghana ensured that the oceanic dungeons of religion naturally swallowed them up. Yes, they are in the places of worships and mountaintops solving all the alleged spiritual problems of their husbands, children, homes, community and nation at large via the fervency and efficacy of prayer and faith. For a reward, they are seen as the best role models. You know, a good woman is the praying one. Else she is but an arrogant if not an outright bad one. Our Ghanaian society is yet to come to terms with embracing educated women who can see through the instituted shackles of suppression.

Dr. Aggrey once told us that, for rapid development we need the educated woman to prosecute the agenda. More than ever in any generation, our growing daughters need these educated women to emulate as role models from every intellectual avenue. So doing little in the comprehensive liberation effort, we are starving our daughters. The repercussions are their minimal contribution towards national development. It is time to revamp and oil the emacipatory machinery. This means the affirmative action groups must cast their net beyond just fitting them into the paparazzi kitchens.

In addition, whilst we forever hold in high esteem the multitudes of our hardworking women collectively called "market women", they can no longer be role models to our daughtets as was the case in the past. A continuation of that is acceptance and endorsement of national mediocrity. Notwithstanding the indisputable importance of agriculture, the world is increasingly moving away from tilling the ground to mining the mind. The mining avenues of the human mind for the benefit of a nation are the arts, mathematics and sciences.

This is why you must be worried that we are focussing on only the arts (religion, politics and entertainment) and neglecting and forgetting the rest to our own detriments. They have had enough of the musicians, journalists, politicians and prayer warriors saturating and dominating the society for far too long as the only visible role models.

The sky is no longer the limit for humanity for the paparazzi world to be our daughters' limit. We do not even know if there is a limit at all. Our daughters must be encouraged to join the open inexhautible explorative kitchens of the sciences, mathematics, engineering and technological innovations in addition to the arts to prepare their intellectual meal for our national consumption and development.

That means we have need women from those areas to also make themselves visible. In addition to the numerous female groups focussing on the paparazzi world, we also need a group like Ghana Association of Women Engineers, Mathematicians and Scientists (GAWEMS) to prosecute and disseminate the urgent message of seeding and harvesting these crops of daughters for the nation. We need them.

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